Wherewithal Grants

Wherewithal Grants is sponsored by Washington Project for the Arts. Provides financial support and peer mentorship to DC-area artists in research and project presentations.

2/19/26: 2026 Grantees announced Grants for artists in the DC area Courtesy of WPA and the Andy Warhol Foundation Washington Project for the Arts Sobia Ahmad and Benny Shaffer Entangled Terrain is a three-day symposium that brings together a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and poets whose work probes land and film as reciprocal sites of encounter.

The symposium, which foregrounds film as an embodied medium, will include a screening of celluloid-based experimental films, a live expanded cinema performance by Ahmad and Shaffer, along with sound artist Jessica Fuquay, and a hands-on film-processing workshop.

Addressing notions of ecological interconnectedness, the symposium will explore how materially focused moving-image practices can open up various ways of sensing and relating to land. Cultivate , along with other collaborators, will be a key conversation partner in shaping the project.

abdu ali mongo and Maleke Glee twurl, a literary journal dedicated to Black gay poetics twurl is an annual multi-genre publication inspired by the Black queer body in motion: how we move through the quotidian; how we navigate visibility and survival; and how dance culture, particularly the vogue scene, offers a language for presence, style, and self-determination.

The project publishes contemporary prose, poetry, scholarly writing, and photographic works by queer men and masc-identifying people of the African diaspora.

Grounded in the legacy of Black oratory history, the Black radical tradition, and the archives of independent Black queer underground publications, twurl extends these lineages into a contemporary journal that centers the Black queer gaze and insists on the value of Black gay everyday life as a site of intellect, pleasure, community, and record.

This grant will partially support the production expenses of twurl ’s inaugural issue and underwrite a public launch event slated for Fall 2026. topophilia africana : haptic membra(i)n(e) topophilia africana : haptic membra(i)n(e) is a performance dinner that attends to intimacy, saudade, and the entrasensory dimensions of breaking bread to counter longing and fracture inside African immigrant communities.

Centering Sudano Sahelian regional cuisines traditionally eaten by hand, the meal foregrounds the shared dexterity of an ecologically unified region that has been actively divided by ethnic difference, and rigid borders, even in the diaspora.

Soil as Witness: Excavating Land, Memory, and Institutional Power As a member of the Soil Memory Project collective, Harewood is asking the question: What does soil remember that institutions forget?

From Kenilworth Park’s layered history, to Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Soil Collection Project , to Sarah Lewis’s motif of the “ground,” to recently discovered burial sites—this research project seeks to unearth hidden local histories buried below, while finding ways for visual art to educate, heal, and transform.

Ancestral Soil, Living Networks Hoysted’s research explores how art and science can work together to help us better understand fungi. Using DNA imagery and immersive art, she will look at how fungal networks store information, communicate, and make decisions. At the same time, respecting Irish animistic traditions that view fungi and soil as living, aware beings.

By connecting this traditional ecological knowledge with modern mycology, the project asks whether new scientific tools can support and affirm older ways of knowing nature, rather than replacing them. Brooke Jay and Chrystal Seawood B O D Y P A R T Y is a research project exploring dance as a somatic intervention and embodied inquiry into bodily awareness for Black womxn.

Through movement-based research, the project examines how dancers respond somatically and emotionally to different sensory inputs—such as music and lighting—and how those responses shape bodily awareness.

Paper Cuts: An oral history of zines and DIY publications in the 21st century In an effort to better trace the developments of zines and community-driven DIY publication projects in the 21st century, Kardambikis will collect interviews with people who can speak to a variety of local publishing scenes across the country.

The important aspects of small-press—local specificity, hand-made and underground production, informal distribution networks, limited availability, limited lifespan—are what define their strengths and also accurately describe why these projects are so difficult to trace over time. These conversations will be archived and published as part of the Paper Cuts project and podcast.

Mississippi / Magdalena uses revisionist history to explore colonized land and waterways elusive to Black and Brown bodies through the displacement of mixed diasporas. This work requires an investigative collaboration and deep connection with the dead, in a playful and irreverent fable that calls legends to life and ghosts to play.

Monsalve is grappling with what it means to collaborate with the dead through her grandfather's unpublished stories, whose notebooks of writings were found after his death. To excavate these legacies, she begins by tracing the rivers of her ancestry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Rio Magdalena in Columbia. Both waterways have deep ties to musical traditions including the Blues and Cumbia.

Monsalve’s lineage holds the embodiment of two worlds, elusive but embedded in her... two rivers, one sound and diaspora, misplaced on tethered land, in a body between land and sea. Cooking Memory: An Intergenerational Cooking Workshop Cooking Memory draws inspiration from the ways in which many mothers and grandmothers reveal their memories in fragments while their hands are at work in the kitchen.

This intergenerational cooking workshop seeks to stage a space for an impromptu form of archiving, where the shared act of cooking facilitates the preservation of memory through conversation. Here, the table, the ingredient, and the practice of its preparation become the means by which generational memory is passed down.

Fragments of Memory, Threads of Sound Thompson’s research investigates how ancestral memory persists through diasporic material, focusing on sound and photographic traces within Caribbean and diasporic communities. Fieldwork will include recording voices, songs, and ambient environments, including Jamaican Patois, and photographing objects, textiles, and spaces that carry intergenerational histories.

Combined with archival research and visual documentation, these materials will form a foundation for future photographic and sound-based projects that preserve, activate, and honor the continuity of lineage and memory.

Rasha Abdulhadi & Fargo Nissim Tbakhi No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning and Militancy This project is an iterative, site-specific, partly improvised ritual performance that invites artists to engage in public mourning of Palestinians, reckoning with the immense scale of annihilatory colonial violence while centering the need for ongoing and escalating resistance to the forces of empire across the globe.

Artists spanning a range of communities, practices, and lineages have created short performance scores which will then be interpreted by Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi through performance, offering a multiplicity of ways to find space for mourning which supports, rather than distracts from, militant resistance efforts.

The Allure of Light | رَغبتِ نُور Sobia Ahmad ’s research explores an ancient Sufi parable about a group of moths and a flame. Often told orally and sung in South Asian poetry, the parable is an everyday metaphor for 'seeking.

’ Over the grant period, Sobia is conducting a multidisciplinary investigation and expanding on the moth-flame metaphor by engaging with scientists, ethnomusicologists, and devotional poetry and music practitioners from Pakistan and India. this house is a body/this body is a house This project, organized by Claire Alrich, is a performance celebration of the house that houses D. I.

Y. venue RhizomeDC. Practically speaking, it is an installation that knits together a multidisciplinary cohort of artists for a durational, site-specific performance in collaboration with the architecture of the art-space/house.

Poetically speaking, this project is an ode to impermanence—the impermanence of spaces, the impermanence of bodies, the impermanence of our bodies within spaces—nothing lasts…and yet traces are left behind: memories, marks, and ghosts.

Sonic Cartographies: Mapping Place and Identity Through Sound Rhea Beckett’s research will expand her sonic practice into immersive installations that evoke deeper connections to place, memory, and identity. Through various experiments and collaborations, she will transform auditory experiences into visual space through shared stories and histories.

Even beloved things move ‍ Conceptual photographer Nakeya Brown ’s practice-driven research will explore the history of objects, with a particular focus on uncovering their often overlooked connections to Black femme lives. Drawing on concepts of race, gender, memory, and bio-mythography, Brown’s research will be guided by the following questions: Whose lives can past objects reveal in meaningful ways?

What material histories out of Black womanhood remain hidden in plain sight? How can we create Black femme spaces through material culture today? The Durational Performance of Cut Flowers Artist-organizer Adele Kenworthy ’s research explores their mother’s rituals of visible hope—ancestral practices absent from museums and archives—as the last remaining connection to her heritage.

They focus on the question, “How do we preserve the unspoken oral histories written by our bodies? ” and through this inquiry, Kenworthy tends to counter-memories and how they exist in public for the AAPI diaspora in the DC metro area, beginning with the Chinese hand laundries in Old Town Alexandria.

In illuminating memories of migration, embodied care, and commemoration, they reimagine a flourishing community archive that practices collective resilience. The Colonizer’s Trash is a performance lecture and interactive social practice by multidisciplinary artist Stephanie A. Kimou .

This work redefines the concept of "trash" to include mindsets, ideologies, and material excess tied to colonial histories of anti-Blackness and exploitation. In line with Stephanie’s ongoing exploration of colonialism’s toxic legacies, the project invites participants to reflect on what they hold onto, and what they can let go of.

Through this participatory event, attendees are encouraged to bring items that symbolize colonial structures, which will be collectively examined, repurposed, or discarded as an act of decolonization, reclamation, and communal introspection. Interdisciplinary artist-curator Tsedaye Makonnen has been drawn to light as a material for many years because of its layered meanings and its scientific and magical properties.

This research grant will enable her to expand her abilities, language, and knowledge of lighting design to explore the recurring themes in her practice and activism on: migration, intersectional feminism, and reproductive rights, specifically focused on Black femmes and gender expansive individuals.

Vèvè-Punk: Digitizing Haitian Vodou Dominick Rabrun’ s research will examine how digital and interactive media can faithfully portray Haitian Vodou, embracing its complexity and fluidity. He will consult practitioners, cultural historians, and artists to ensure respectful representation, while weaving his personal perspective into visuals that challenge the limits of digital technology.

By honoring Vodou’s inherent ambiguity, Rabrun will create a framework for immersive, culturally rich experiences that invite audiences to engage with Afro-Caribbean heritage in new and meaningful ways. DC’s prominent landowners, the Burnes and Van Ness families, enslaved dozens of Black people for tobacco cultivation and domestic labor in the Nation’s Capital—a history often neglected and unnamed.

Forever in the Path is a public art project by Jessica Valoris that honors the memory of those enslaved here by creating a series of commemorative stained glass panels that tell this untold story. This project invites viewers into an ongoing process of learning, reckoning, and repair. This project is a collaboration between Jessica and First Congregational United Church of Christ (FCUCC).

The collaborative design process will be documented and shared through an art book, while programming will engage both the congregation and the wider public in conversations around historic research, reparations in action, and community healing.

Rasha Abdulhadi's research focused on the question, “How can tatreez, traditional Palestinian embroidery, be queered, and how can that queering re-engage this indigenous art form as a practice of communal creativity and pre-literate communication?

” Rasha Abdulhadi & Fargo Nissim Tbakhi No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning and Militancy This project is an iterative, site-specific, partly improvised ritual performance that invites artists to engage in public mourning of Palestinians, reckoning with the immense scale of annihilatory colonial violence while centering the need for ongoing and escalating resistance to the forces of empire across the globe.

Artists spanning a range of communities, practices, and lineages have created short performance scores which will then be interpreted by Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi through performance, offering a multiplicity of ways to find space for mourning which supports, rather than distracts from, militant resistance efforts.

‍ Shab-e-Shehr: A Night of Gathering “Shab-e-shehr” translates from Farsi to “night of poetry,” and references informal gatherings to share and discuss poetry, stories, conversations, and music. This project, organized by Niki Afsar , included four gatherings, ending on the holiday Shab-e-Yalda.

Niki invited Iranian and diasporic artists to share their work, and included an open portion for anyone attending to share poetry, music, and thoughts on how to continue solidarity with the current revolution in Iran. Sobia Ahmad explored how textiles and traditional crafts preserve cultural memory and ancestral knowledge, specifically that of immigrant and indigenous communities.

The Allure of Light | رَغبتِ نُور Sobia Ahmad ’s research explores an ancient Sufi parable about a group of moths and a flame. Often told orally and sung in South Asian poetry, the parable is an everyday metaphor for 'seeking.

’ Over the grant period, Sobia is conducting a multidisciplinary investigation and expanding on the moth-flame metaphor by engaging with scientists, ethnomusicologists, and devotional poetry and music practitioners from Pakistan and India.

Sobia Ahmad and Benny Shaffer Entangled Terrain is a three-day symposium that brings together a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and poets whose work probes land and film as reciprocal sites of encounter.

The symposium, which foregrounds film as an embodied medium, will include a screening of celluloid-based experimental films, a live expanded cinema performance by Ahmad and Shaffer, along with sound artist Jessica Fuquay, and a hands-on film-processing workshop.

Addressing notions of ecological interconnectedness, the symposium will explore how materially focused moving-image practices can open up various ways of sensing and relating to land. Cultivate , along with other collaborators, will be a key conversation partner in shaping the project.

abdu ali mongo and Maleke Glee twurl, a literary journal dedicated to Black gay poetics twurl is an annual multi-genre publication inspired by the Black queer body in motion: how we move through the quotidian; how we navigate visibility and survival; and how dance culture, particularly the vogue scene, offers a language for presence, style, and self-determination.

The project publishes contemporary prose, poetry, scholarly writing, and photographic works by queer men and masc-identifying people of the African diaspora.

Grounded in the legacy of Black oratory history, the Black radical tradition, and the archives of independent Black queer underground publications, twurl extends these lineages into a contemporary journal that centers the Black queer gaze and insists on the value of Black gay everyday life as a site of intellect, pleasure, community, and record.

This grant will partially support the production expenses of twurl ’s inaugural issue and underwrite a public launch event slated for Fall 2026. this house is a body/this body is a house This project, organized by Claire Alrich, is a performance celebration of the house that houses D. I.

Y. venue RhizomeDC. Practically speaking, it is an installation that knits together a multidisciplinary cohort of artists for a durational, site-specific performance in collaboration with the architecture of the art-space/house.

Poetically speaking, this project is an ode to impermanence—the impermanence of spaces, the impermanence of bodies, the impermanence of our bodies within spaces—nothing lasts…and yet traces are left behind: memories, marks, and ghosts. This trans-disciplinary archival project by Ama BE interrogated unseen, voluntary, land-based African labor that helped feed migrated families and preserve cultural practices on foreign soil.

Centered around African migrations to the DC area between 1960–1990, Ngo {Palm Oil} collected nuanced narratives around performances of Black labor, sacred land stewardship, and redressed absences of African migrants from the landscape of contemporary Africainity and futurist discourses.

topophilia africana : haptic membra(i)n(e) topophilia africana : haptic membra(i)n(e) is a performance dinner that attends to intimacy, saudade, and the entrasensory dimensions of breaking bread to counter longing and fracture inside African immigrant communities.

Centering Sudano Sahelian regional cuisines traditionally eaten by hand, the meal foregrounds the shared dexterity of an ecologically unified region that has been actively divided by ethnic difference, and rigid borders, even in the diaspora.

Sonic Cartographies: Mapping Place and Identity Through Sound Rhea Beckett’s research will expand her sonic practice into immersive installations that evoke deeper connections to place, memory, and identity. Through various experiments and collaborations, she will transform auditory experiences into visual space through shared stories and histories.

‍ Mukhe Mukhe/Mouth-to-Mouth Monica Jahan Bose researched the intangible heritage of songs, poetry, and food in DC and Bangladesh, to reframe the story of climate injustice in these two communities. Even beloved things move ‍ Conceptual photographer Nakeya Brown ’s practice-driven research will explore the history of objects, with a particular focus on uncovering their often overlooked connections to Black femme lives.

Drawing on concepts of race, gender, memory, and bio-mythography, Brown’s research will be guided by the following questions: Whose lives can past objects reveal in meaningful ways? What material histories out of Black womanhood remain hidden in plain sight? How can we create Black femme spaces through material culture today?

‍ Fabiola Ching and Mayah Lovell dyke’s day , a holigay is a multimedia and multisensory publication about a surrealist holiday for lesbians organized by Fabiola Ching and Mayah Lovell. Writers and artists worked together to write and visualize a continuation of an existing manuscript by Mayah, resulting in a 25-30 page body of work exploring what a holiday for lesbians can look, sound, feel, taste, and smell like.

Alina Collins Maldonado researched traditions and expectations passed down from mothers to their daughters and how those same traditions and expectations define who they are. By conducting interviews and community workshops with women in the DC area, Alina pursued answers to questions about the traditions we choose to pass on and which ones we choose to leave behind.

CONTROL-ALT-DELETE (Dawne Langford, Dafna Steinberg, and Alex Tyson) A Series of Interventions in the Gendered Digital Space This newly formed collective (Dawne Langford, Dafna Steinberg , and Alex Tyson) builds visual language analyzing cyberpsychology, machine learning technology, and popular internet culture.

During the grant period, they trained artificial intelligence (using machine learning) to explore gender inequality, performative reconciliation, and define nuances of tone inherent in built-in structures, both online and off. Larry Cook researched the aesthetics of prison and club photography, and their relationship to the photographic archive. This grant supported him in the development of an archive of club vernacular photography.

Crafting Care: The Poetics of Design, Computation, and Abolition Ayana Zaire Cotton researched the relationships between abolitionist technologies and aesthetics to understand how they might help us imagine a liberated future. This involves the study of Indigenous African objects and textiles, and how the fractals in their designs might be used to reorganize our physical world using computing and code.

Seeda School speculates: what is a pedagogical Black aesthetic? Grounded in an obsession with the immaterial generativity of Black study, Seeda School is a conceptual education platform rooted in worldbuilding. This experimental pedagogical project explores the Black feminist legacy of teaching and leverages online course frameworks, video, and the aesthetic of speculative fiction to help participants imagine new worlds.

Inquiries on Release and Other Paths to Liberty ‍ janet e. dandridge 's research centered on Post/Present-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PPTSD) driven by the question: How can memory, dreams, asylum, and catharsis contribute to holistic healing for individuals who’ve experienced and continue to experience trauma throughout their lives?

This research specifically pertains to societal trauma perpetuated by racism and misogyny, and in particular, the PPTSD of Black women and girls. Colored exits: the act of liberating oneself from harm Deirdre Darden ’s research explored the idea and the history of the act of liberating oneself from harm; a concept she refers to as a “colored exit.

” The colored exit has deep roots driven by Nina Simone's answer to the question: “What does freedom mean to you?" "(No fear!) ” TRANSLATIONS: A research into identity, language, and embodiment ‍ Archival forms and transdisciplinary languages are central to Rex Delafkaran 's research, which centered questions including: what can a physical archive of experience look like?

In what ways do we translate our personal and historical archives into our bodies, and how do these haptic translations deepen and hybridize existing knowledge? Labor of Love: And Other Lies We're Sold Dirt commissioned original research and content from established writers and organizers who are working to explore, expand, and expose topics of labor, equity, and socio-political justice within the arts. Organized by Mēlani N.

Douglass alongside an intergenerational team serving their signature blue tea, The People’s Parlor aims to expand and elevate the concept of the traditional apothecary by infusing it with modern-day practices that celebrate diversity and inclusivity. The tea salons, guided by an innovative model, provide vibrant hubs where diverse voices can be heard, and community members actively participate in shaping their narratives.

‍ Jeremiah Edwards and Jeremiah Long With the goal of developing curriculum, this artist-duo (Jeremiah Edwards and Jeremiah Long) studied the impact of place-based education on local youth in DC’s Black community. They pursued answers to a central question: Can a holistic understanding of one’s relationship to a place instill political urgency, social awareness, and the will to uplift one’s community?

Extraordinary Artists International (Naoco Wowsugi) A Roadmap to the O-1 Visa This project, led by Naoco Wowsugi , is a guidebook for first time O-1 applicants.

It takes the position that these immigration processes are unjust obstructions to living and working in the US that have significant structural and individual consequences, and aims to cultivate a solidarity network among visa seekers, aspiring allies, and supportive cultural institutions in the US.

‍ Exploring the Sculptural Language for Embodied Black Aesthetics Adrienne Gaither used this opportunity to create her own residency and expand her practice through sculptural apprenticeships with seasoned artists and architects. She is continuing to experiment with 3-dimensional forms to further embody Black aesthetics, facilitate world-building, and provide new perspectives on geometric abstraction.

DRYLONGSO: AN EXPLORATION OF BLACK LIFE, FOOD, PLANTS, AND LAND Curry J. Hackett researched "Black landscapes”—exploring the socio-ecological relationships that Black folks foster and maintain within urban environments. His research is based on the assumption that these relationships exist, or can be envisioned, in spite of pervasive neo-colonial attitudes.

Soil as Witness: Excavating Land, Memory, and Institutional Power As a member of the Soil Memory Project collective, Harewood is asking the question: What does soil remember that institutions forget?

From Kenilworth Park’s layered history, to Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Soil Collection Project , to Sarah Lewis’s motif of the “ground,” to recently discovered burial sites—this research project seeks to unearth hidden local histories buried below, while finding ways for visual art to educate, heal, and transform. Up to Code?

Where ableism meets patriarchy in art and technology ‍ As a woman artist with disabilities working in and with technology, Michelle Lisa Herman researched the intersection of feminism, technology, art, and disability. Specifically, she looked at the relationships between ableism and patriarchy and the ways in which assumed defaults, when mediated through technology, continue to perpetuate assumptions that disenfranchise all.

Ancestral Soil, Living Networks Hoysted’s research explores how art and science can work together to help us better understand fungi. Using DNA imagery and immersive art, she will look at how fungal networks store information, communicate, and make decisions. At the same time, respecting Irish animistic traditions that view fungi and soil as living, aware beings.

By connecting this traditional ecological knowledge with modern mycology, the project asks whether new scientific tools can support and affirm older ways of knowing nature, rather than replacing them. Imogen-Blue Hinojosa 's practice engages the public in the discourses surrounding trans rights, including sex workers, trauma, and the need for social reform to protect trans women of color.

This new series of work utilized film and textiles as a means to draw parallels between epic poetry and non-fictional epics, and collecting the histories and stories which exist in her community. Brooke Jay and Chrystal Seawood B O D Y P A R T Y is a research project exploring dance as a somatic intervention and embodied inquiry into bodily awareness for Black womxn.

Through movement-based research, the project examines how dancers respond somatically and emotionally to different sensory inputs—such as music and lighting—and how those responses shape bodily awareness. ‍ Who Cares for Artists?

A Field Guide of Artistic Survival Andy Johnson ’s research was propelled by the question of how artists and creatives sustain challenging practices, ones that require mental, emotional, psychological, and physical agility. His research explored the role of care and repair as it pertains to the integrity of the artist themself, rather than the representation of care in objects or exhibitions.

Artists carry the weight of complex and difficult subject matter that demands and depletes. They are challenged to remain whole as they alchemize and distill their relationship to gender identity and expression, class, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and immigration status. Thus, Andy asked: “if artists are tasked with caring for the world, who takes care of artists?

” ‍ The Alternative School for Poetry and Poetic Inquiry Taylor Johnson 's project speaks back to the dominance and inevitability of the creative writing MFA, the current commodification of poetry, and its siloing into academic institutions. He interrogated the question “What does a poet do?

”, prompted by Gwendolyn Brooks’ questioning of her role as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, and other related lines of inquiry into the making and nurturing of the practice, creative life, and livelihood of an artist.

This inquiry was supported by research into the lives and works of three Black revolutionary thinkers and artists whose work shapes the social, cultural, and communal landscapes of the DC area: Benjamin Banneker, James Hampton, and Georgia Mills Jessup.

Paper Cuts: An oral history of zines and DIY publications in the 21st century In an effort to better trace the developments of zines and community-driven DIY publication projects in the 21st century, Kardambikis will collect interviews with people who can speak to a variety of local publishing scenes across the country.

The important aspects of small-press—local specificity, hand-made and underground production, informal distribution networks, limited availability, limited lifespan—are what define their strengths and also accurately describe why these projects are so difficult to trace over time. These conversations will be archived and published as part of the Paper Cuts project and podcast.

The Durational Performance of Cut Flowers Artist-organizer Adele Kenworthy ’s research explores their mother’s rituals of visible hope—ancestral practices absent from museums and archives—as the last remaining connection to her heritage. They focus on the question, “How do we preserve the unspoken oral histories written by our bodies?

” and through this inquiry, Kenworthy tends to counter-memories and how they exist in public for the AAPI diaspora in the DC metro area, beginning with the Chinese hand laundries in Old Town Alexandria. In illuminating memories of migration, embodied care, and commemoration, they reimagine a flourishing community archive that practices collective resilience.

‍ Humanizing Invisible Labor This project aimed to humanize the production of invisible transnational labor. To trace the labor of “productive” industries such as mass-manufacturing plants for consumer goods, Cecilia Kim connected with individual workers and their communities in the larger social fabric.

Using documentary film to expand social impact and accessibility, the film served as a record of invisible labor and channel for unrepresented voices. The Colonizer’s Trash is a performance lecture and interactive social practice by multidisciplinary artist Stephanie A. Kimou .

This work redefines the concept of "trash" to include mindsets, ideologies, and material excess tied to colonial histories of anti-Blackness and exploitation. In line with Stephanie’s ongoing exploration of colonialism’s toxic legacies, the project invites participants to reflect on what they hold onto, and what they can let go of.

Through this participatory event, attendees are encouraged to bring items that symbolize colonial structures, which will be collectively examined, repurposed, or discarded as an act of decolonization, reclamation, and communal introspection. Vagabond is a zine project featuring contemporary Vietnamese American visual artists, musicians, poets, and writers.

50 years after the end of the war, the project aims to capture current perspectives of the diaspora beyond stories of trauma and displacement. Anthony Le partnered with Philippa Pham Hughes , brought together through their shared interest in exploring the duality of what it means to be Vietnamese and American.

The featured artists demonstrated how expansive “Vietnamese American” can be through a diversity of backgrounds, ideas, mediums, and personal and speculative storytelling. Madyha J. Leghari ’s research employed the metaphor of the ‘mothertongue’ as a comprehensive term to expand on concepts of language and motherhood, both independently and where they intersect.

She applied a posthumanist perspective to two interrelated inquiries: first, how might we reconceptualize motherhood if the conventional ties between reproduction, parenthood, and childcare are severed? Second, in what ways can the diverse symbolic and literal interpretations of the 'tongue' contribute to our understanding of language, speech, and inheritance?

In this aspect, she proposes a multidisciplinary investigation of the tongue as organ, biomatter, machine, inheritance, and intelligence. ‍ Cy-Fae: Queer EcoFeminist Futures in Extended Reality Armando Lopez-Bircann ’s research focuses on how artists can nurture queer ecofeminist thought through emerging Extended Reality (XR) artwork and social technologies.

During the grant period, they explored how the artist/activist, or “artivist,” can use affect and glamor to communicate a compelling, optimistic vision of the future. Interdisciplinary artist-curator Tsedaye Makonnen has been drawn to light as a material for many years because of its layered meanings and its scientific and magical properties.

This research grant will enable her to expand her abilities, language, and knowledge of lighting design to explore the recurring themes in her practice and activism on: migration, intersectional feminism, and reproductive rights, specifically focused on Black femmes and gender expansive individuals. This research project by Mercedes focused on how pitches and tones can be pulled from the sound of weapons being destroyed and transformed.

Neha Misra and Fid Thompson This collaborative eco-art project is germinated by Neha Misra and Fid Thompson . The project asks: "What plant-tree-human love stories insist on persisting amongst the trials and triumphs of our urban lives?